failed step

Stumbled on the first step up to the temple.

it ends here

Don’t go angry through any door.

hard liquor

It was the kind of country where the water was just fine, but the admonition was, “Don’t drink the hooch.”

scene scheme

The trailer was a gloss for the whole film.

cast a truly jaundiced eye upon

Looking at the world through piss-tinted glasses.

paper money

Prints are the paper money of famous artists. A currency issued from the treasury of their reputation and esteem.

conflict to confluence

There’s the rub, we need a dialectic friction to create the energy to move forward.

music is

Music: time singing.

end of days

Today a few people believe will be the end of the world. They feel confident they will be ‘raptured’, taken up to their version of heaven. These people are by & large fundamentalists. They believe the Bible (in the language they are reading it) is the literal word of God (verbatim). These fundamentalists calculate the end of the world through this text, the Bible. But either the word problems God composed are too hard for humans, or God was not really very good at math, because the fundamentalists never seem to calculate the correct date for the end of the world. Whether it’s the inscrutable words or the fuzzy math, it shows the fallacy of believing that one knows what the Bible means.

end in sight

I’ve started reading a big novel I knew I’d never finish.

gave as good as you got

In a recent argument with myself I found I was rather overmatched. Not sure if that was a bad thing or not.

relative height

Sitting next to you I feel taller than when I’m standing by myself.

essential services

In the midst of a budget crises, when a government threatens to shutdown except for ‘essential services’, I wonder if that’s the problem: The government is providing too many nonessential services.

please change the channel

A job I would kill myself for: Television critic.

not in

Slip the stream.

duly unemployed

The unemployment rate dropped to 8.8% today. Which is still high, but we must remember that at any given time about 5% of the workforce shouldn’t be employed at all, anywhere, anytime. They are bad workers. So we’re closer to a true ‘full’ employment than we think.

no memory

Time hasn’t any memory. But we may call it history for the sake of convenience.

we'll make great pets

People get along so well with their pets because they are the most unequal of their relationships. Though sometimes it may be the pet that has the upper hand in the duo.

digital death match

Watson v. Google: Let the games begin.

at winter's end

Pot holes can be thought of as negative space speed bumps.

unshared carnage

The all-volunteer armed forces makes war less visible to large portions of the population. The draft, taking young men without their consent, makes all of the nation keenly aware of a war’s wasteful carnage. As it now stands, the volunteers come from two classes: Those conscripted by poverty or lack of prospects. Those with romantic notions of patriotism or adventure. The rest of our youth (and their parents) remain unscathed by the foreign wars.

relative scale

The spectacles got grander and the people grew smaller.

it takes two

When the dialectic has danced itself out.

too much too little

When to elaborate would be to obfuscate and to summarize would be to lie.

corner story

In the labyrinth, keep telling yourself that the end of Ariadne’s thread is around the next corner, because many times the lost have been brought out to the light by such false hope.

wordless world

The TV on, no sound, yet I could understand everything.

what wealth is for

The sacred duty of the rich is preservation of cultural capital (art, architecture, libraries, etc.).

relatively succesful

I was top among the underachievers.

tongue oil

Talk is the lubricant of the mind. Thought, reading, and writing have their benefits, but there is nothing like articulation on the fly to clarify.

find a pulse

Pleasure is the pulse of life.

invasive species

Number one inimical invasive species: humankind.

flimsy

It proved to be a brittle kind of celebrity.

there's no there there

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that we’ll have a lot to talk about when we get there.

neither here nor there

locus-pocus

word problem

The news account stated: ‘X was found sleeping in a restroom’. That kind of makes sense.

whose money

When I hear someone say ‘I want keep more of my money’ or ‘The government wants to take all my money’, I want to ask that person to take a bill from his wallet or her purse and to read it: That bill has ‘The United States of America’ printed on it, and the only reason it’s worth more than the paper it’s printed on is because a strong government supports the rule of law, infrastructure, security, education and the social programs that give value to that currency. That money is a gift of your good government.

just say no

Why does society confuse the lack of prohibition of an act or a thing with the promotion of that act/thing? Society could decriminalize narcotics and at the same time promote drug avoidance and addiction rehabilitation programs, and do so at a cost far less (in dollars and lives lost) than is spent on interdiction, prosecution and incarceration.

oversimplified

To simplify is to lie.

jealous city

A city afflicted by skyscraper envy.

liberal media bias

If a person pursues a field that requires openminded attention and thoroughgoing inquiry, like journalism, it’s natural that they’d be liberal-minded. The narrow and closed-off conservative mindset need not apply.